


The Wild Nothing

by viviandarkbloom



Series: are we cool, vincent? [1]
Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-02-17 06:43:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2300204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yes, I'm going where few have tread before, so I'm warning you now. #sorrynotsorry</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. winterbourne

“Where every something, being blent together,

Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,

Express'd and not express'd.”

—Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure,_ Act III, Scene 2

Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

—Nelson Algren, _A Walk on the Wild Side_

**i. winterbourne**

Caroline’s memories of Christmas are warped by the sugar of nostalgia. When the boys were young, of course, everything about the holiday seemed festive and fun, because she saw it all through their happy, greedy eyes. Now, of course, it is completely different; the holiday—weeks away but as annoyingly persistently close as a truck in a rear-view mirror— is a stranglehold upon her time and sanity. In thrall to insomnia the night before, she had watched part of some old movie on the telly—shimmering in black and white, strangely vibrant in a way that neither real life nor color quite possessed—and just as fate would have it, seconds after she flicked to the station a character played by Laurence Harvey exclaimed, “Twelve days of Christmas! One day is loathsome enough!” In hearty agreement she silently toasted the dead actor and when, several scenes later, after Laurence Harvey had shot his wife and his father-in-law and a harmless bottle of milk, she slipped into sleep while remembering that her mother once had a crush on Laurence Harvey and trying to remind herself to ask Gillian what the hell this movie was, because Gillian seemed to be a repository of useless movie information.

The countryside is bare and dry except for the odd stream here and there that defies winter with its patient, bright trickle. Bleached-bone roads lead to a series of destinations that no longer hold any kind of interest or promise. Every day she finds herself driving back and forth—from work, from the town, from home, and occasionally from Gillian’s farm—and expanding upon the bleak metaphor: the roads are the skeletal remains of her life and this hopeless back and forth the weaving of a burial shroud. Sometimes when she’s not in much of a hurry she will take a detour and stop in the middle of nowhere on a road that hardly anyone uses anymore. She’ll get out of the car and, braced by the cold, will stare across the horizon and wait for bravery or desperation or some other emotion to unlatch itself within her so that she can scream into the wild nothing. But all the rage and misery that she barely contains around others never finds expression here in these great soulful moments of solitude, and she only ends up staring past the lacunae of the hills into the vanishing point of the horizon. Georgia O’Keefe would have gone mad painting nothing but Yorkshire sunsets, Caroline thinks. Her mind meanders into pointless speculation of what will happen next, what shit surprise lurks around the bend. It could be no worse than losing everything through your own cowardly culpability, no worse than the perpetual middle-aged realization—perpetual because one’s memory is shit as well, and as a result it’s a continual epiphany on hamster wheels— that one doesn’t really know much at all.

She wants to scream but never does, and so feels a failure at grieving as well.


	2. children and empty rooms

**children and empty rooms**

The house is always empty, it seems, but Caroline never feels alone. Perhaps, she theorizes, this is because everyone takes it for granted and no one attaches quite the same importance to living there that she does, at least not any more. Her husband haunts the house. William has returned for the holiday break, but will soon be gone again. For Lawrence, home is a well-stocked pantry and a place to sleep. Her mother and Alan pass through amiably, like distracted tenants. It’s mildly infuriating that two old people possess more energy for life than she does. They also have ample enthusiasm for meddling. One afternoon, after a jaunt into town and lunch with Harry, they return triumphantly to assault Caroline with their happiness. At times Caroline wishes she could hate Alan—it would be easier to keep bothersome emotions and the complications of his bloody family at a reserve then—but no, he has to be as adorable as a puppy, bright as a penny, kind as Mother Teresa, and here he is, in her kitchen, smiling and waving a brightly colored flyer at Caroline.

“Strapping young lad gave this to me in town—thought you should see—” Alan offers the flyer to Caroline. 

Celia, close on Alan’s heels, amends, “He wasn’t that strapping.” 

Alan is outraged. “He was!”

“Did you think he was actually flirting with you? I can’t believe we’re having this conversation about a man, let alone one young enough to be your grandson—it seems a little weird.” Celia shoots a mild “no offense” look at her daughter. 

Glasses on, Caroline looks at it. It’s an advert for a new gay club geared toward men and women, apparently—the inclusiveness is pleasantly shocking—called Ariel. “And I can’t believe,” she begins slowly, “they’re naming a club after a Sylvia Plath poem.” The dead mad American poetess, buried in Heptonstall, was a bit of a cottage industry in the area; her gravesite lured tortured young women the way moonlight attracted sea turtles. Perhaps soon they will open up a leather bar called “Colossus.” She wonders if she should suggest it to someone— did the village gays have a naming committee? 

Alan’s eyes widen in surprise. “Was she—?” he whispers.

Mercifully, Celia is silent; her lips struggle to contain the heavy burden of needless commentary. Like a gunslinger, Caroline eyes her ruthlessly and patiently, waiting for her mother’s first volley to go amiss so that she may carefully release the verbal kill shot. Realizing that she would easily lose the duel—that the student has now exceeded the master—Celia shrugs in surrender. 

Caroline rubs her brow. “No. She wasn’t. Well, I don’t have proof, but—” She waves the flyer. “—thank you. For thinking of me.”

Alan harrumphs modestly. “I thought perhaps, if you got out a bit, mingled with folk—er, your kind of folk—”

Celia pretends to find a tea saucer fascinating. “Is this new?” she chirrups. 

“I could come with,” Alan offers.

Caroline blinks. “What?” 

“If you didn't want to go alone.”

Could the day, the month, the year, her life, grow any stranger? “What, you'd be my wingman?” 

“Aye!”

Beyond anything that’s happened in recent days, this robust offer touches Caroline. She laughs. “You don't even know what that is. God, I’m not even sure I know what that is.”

He grins and pats her arm. “Ah, well. Learning new things, it's what keeps you young.”

Finally, Celia succumbs. “Look, I must say I don’t want Caroline going out and picking up some strange tart—”

Caroline finally snaps. “For God’s sake, no one is picking anyone up—unless you both want to pick me up from an insane asylum!”

“Was expecting you to say you’re already in one,” Alan retorts, still amused. Even his barbs fall as gently as rain. 

It begins anew hours later when William attempts a romantic setup with the mother of an Oxford friend. From his phone he shows her a blurry, surreptitious-looking photo of a woman who looks like Nigella Lawson—a stoned, seedy, hippie version of Nigella Lawson who probably makes her own soap and wears hemp clothes and washes her hair only once a week. 

“Amazing,” murmurs Caroline.

Hopeful, William brightens. “Really?”

“Amazing someone that slaggy has a son at Oxford.” It would be amazing if it were actually Nigella; the thought of having someone around to do all the cooking is vastly appealing. Someone who might just cook in a black slip and a slinky bathrobe, with her hair all mussed and her lips overripe from kissing, and—oh Christ, stop it, Caroline thinks. “I can smell the patchouli from here.”

William rolls his eyes. “Very judgmental.” 

“Sandalwood?”

“Mum!” 

Caroline hands the phone back to him. “Darling, you're sweet, but—”

He smiles sadly. “You're not ready.” 

“No.” She knows if she even attempts to smile she’ll burst into tears. “I’m not.”

Then, shyly, William shows her a photo of a lovely girl he’s dating. She still wishes he were gay, largely because it's come to this: Her son is her best friend, her romantic confidante. They should be lunching together, having mani-pedis, taking selfies while shopping. And yet she cannot help but be a mother and worry about him, as she always has. He possessed her work ethic and his father's hypersensitivity; yet he lacked John's absurd sense of bravado and her finesse at facades. It made him too vulnerable, she had thought. But now she sees him changing. He is no longer a simplistic hybrid of his parents' worst qualities, but a young man who is rather decent, smart, and kind beyond all her expectations. Alas, she has not attained this blissful state of recognition with Lawrence. In him, she sees John’s petulance, her desire to wound, and scads of time for both of them to fuck him up further.

She stands over William as he thumb-swipes through photos of his new mates. Her arms are draped around his neck, her chin atop his curly hair. His shampoo is different—aggressively minty—and it distresses her. He’s no longer using the dull but expensive, odorless salon shampoo that she always bought for him, purchased because she obsessed about his dandruff and dry scalp even more so than her own. He is no longer hers. As she tallies another loss, William grins at a particularly ridiculous photo of his girlfriend mock-strangling a friend’s stuffed bunny. “I’d like to bring her to the wedding, as my plus-one—is that okay?”

“Of course, darling.” As much as she wants to confide in him, she knows she can’t. The collapse of what she had with Kate—however inevitable it seemed in retrospect—has yielded unforeseen aftereffects, unforetold yearnings. In other words, a distinct and underrepresented part of her libido has finally roused itself from a heterosexual coma. And yet it’s not as if she wants to really trawl through a club looking for someone to shag. It is something specific, something that has developed with slow inevitability, like septicemia following an untreated wound. Nothing like comparing your sexual desires to festering wounds—this she thinks as William shows yet another photo of stuffed animal abuse: The hapless bunny is trussed up in a classic hangman’s noose and dangling from a shower head with a “farewell, cruel world” suicide note pinned to his crotch. 

“Hilarious!” William says. 

There is no one in her life that to which she can divulge that particular truth. It’s why, days later, she avoids one of many wedding rehearsal dinners. She would rather roam a quiet, empty house filled with ghosts than face the very real reminders of her failures as evidenced in the niggling persistence of her desires. 

“Yeah, hilarious,” Caroline agrees.


	3. the pilgrimage to cythera

One night many years ago, Caroline had stayed up all night with Lawrence when he had measles. He was a surprisingly unfussy patient—too weak, docile, and miserable to be much bother, and happy to be entertained by the television or the sound of her voice reciting doggerel or the periodic table or, as the hour grew even later, sheer nonsense. When his fever finally broke, he fell into a deep sleep on the couch and she, exhausted, had turned off the living room light and at precisely 4:12 in the morning—Caroline still remembers the triumphant display of the LED clock—discovered the secret life of the house. It was as if she had strolled off a pier and plunged into the sea, where light bent around and embraced the strange distorted darkness of another world. She had been so entranced by it that she plopped into a chair and watched how strands and bursts of light—bleeding in from blinds and curtains and reflected off objects or mirrors—shifted and moved and changed, how the ambient amber dots of slumbering appliances mapped a constellation with no discernable pattern. The next thing she knew it was morning and John was poking her shoulder and complaining that they were out of coffee.

It’s another reason why she can’t bear to think about selling the house; as absurd as she knows it is, surely no other place can commune with her, or comfort her, quite the way this place does. The day fades and the light from outside rolls through the house like fog, filling up rooms and stretching across surfaces, lending a smeared, snapshot quality of blurred, permanent abandonment. She imagines the house sinking, falling to decay, mired at the bottom of the ocean. It’s still hers—the perfect repository for melancholy. Phosphorescent waves stealthily climb the walls and the ceiling; the energy and movement of passing cars, street lamps, porch lights, reflections from the lights in a neighbor’s fountain, perhaps even distant planes and thousands of lives therein, none of it touching her. Caroline is sprawled on the couch, taking it all in. Occasionally her hand swoops down and carefully intercepts a glass of wine. Initially she had been tempted to tipple directly from the bottle but that kind of crudity, she thought, was more John’s style. If she were going to get drunk, she would be a refined drunk. A lady drunk. A lady drunk who likes ladies. Might as well own it.

Everyone is at the rehearsal dinner—very informal, she was told, but one of an interminable amount because her mother leaves nothing to chance. Despite Celia’s moues of disapproval and enervating guilt trips (“but you’re giving me away,” she had wailed) Caroline had managed to be pleasantly noncommittal about showing up and manufactured a vague lie about a faculty meeting—a lie that would be exposed the minute Kate showed up to the rehearsal. Why, she thinks, did her mother still insist on Kate’s involvement—albeit peripheral—in this goddamned wedding? Torture? A Hollywood-like attempt at reconciliation? Or—most likely—just sheer thoughtlessness? There wasn’t anything to reconcile, really—at least not from Kate’s perspective, it seemed. With the steady drip of wine in her blood like an IV, Caroline was committed to the couch; clearly, this was the only kind of relationship she could handle. She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she hears the front door opening, squeaking tentatively before it shuts quietly. She lifts her head. With no small amount of dread she worries John is making an appearance, but the tread on the floor is light, assured, almost certainly feminine. Could it be Judith, coming to kill her and raid the liquor cabinet? Are there serial killers in the neighborhood? Why did she leave the front door unlocked? Why on God’s green earth did she subject herself to watching _Hannibal_? It was almost enough to make one vegetarian, and she had enough problems as it was without reverting to some lesbian stereotype.

“Hello?” It’s Gillian. Caroline keeps her eyes closed, feigning sleep until the pretense seems truly ludicrous and an array of sounds indicate that Gillian is close at hand: the creak of her knees, her sigh, the rustle of her jacket. When she opens her eyes the squatting Gillian is on eye level with her, peering at her with the curious intensity of a diver who has found a mermaid at the bottom of this phantasmagorical suburban wreck.

“Caroline?” Gillian’s rough fingertips whisk playfully against her forearm before slowing into a caress; her fingers curl around Caroline’s wrist, her thumb presses into a weave of veins and Caroline’s pulse responds in kind, thudding dull and stubborn into her touch, as if Gillian’s a braille reader of a rare and distinct language, capable of interpreting the beating of her blood and reading this road map to her disastrous heart.

“Why,” she manages hoarsely, “are you here?” And why, she thinks, must you touch me like that?

“I was sent to check on you.” Gillian is squinting at her in such a way that Caroline wonders how badly she looks. “You all right?”

Caroline sits up, head spinning, and Gillian releases her wrist. “Yeah.”

“Your door’s unlocked.”

“Well, I’ve always depended on the kindness of random sheep farmers.” 

"Yeah, piss off. It’s spooky in here,” Gillian complains.

"Of course you wouldn’t appreciate it. No one does.”

“Appreciate what?”

“Nothing. Look, I’m fine. I told my mother that I probably wouldn’t go to that damned—thing. I’m just tired. Needed some time to myself.”

“Is that the official reason or the real reason?” Again Gillian touches her, the stylus of her fingertip gliding down Caroline’s arm.

She shivers, hoping that Gillian doesn’t notice. What was the real reason anymore? Loss, agony, depression, the fear of bagpipes at the ceremony? “God I hate women,” Caroline blurts. Gillian’s grin is bright enough to be seen in the deepening dusk, a new kind of beauty adorning the ruins. “Not you.”

“Thanks for the validation, as they say.” Her jacket rustles again as she stands and shrugs it off. “I told them all to leave you be—that you were all right. Where’s your phone? William’s been trying to call you.”

 _“That bloody stupid phone.”_ She feels more tethered to the phone than any one person in her entire life. She stands up too quickly and feels wine, blood, and desire flood her head. Her hand cuts through air in a steadying gesture.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah.” She cannot stop thinking about Gillian touching her. It is the one thing that has encroached upon those near-ceaseless thoughts about Kate, it is the one thing that, apparently, her mind and heart desperately needed—an epiphany, a confirmation, a distraction, all rolled up into the person of this exceedingly stubborn, surprisingly complicated, and deliciously rough woman. Delicious? Caroline blames the fucking wine for that one. She glares at her wine glass but rescues it from being booted by Gillian’s cloddish feet. She trails through the darkened house, reluctantly hitting a light switch when Gillian half-trips over someone’s abandoned trainers in the hallway and punctuates the incident with a softly muttered “Shit.”

In the kitchen her phone is buried under a pile of mail, a scarf, and her purse; the ringer is off. While she placates William on the phone, she notices Gillian zeroing in on the hapless bottle of wine, open and defenseless. In lieu of a wine glass she snags a mug from a cupboard. 

“God help me,” Caroline moans aloud. 

William’s panic flourishes anew. “What’s wrong?”

“Gillian’s here.” And she’s drinking all my Malbec. “And she’s acting like a barbarian.”

Gillian flips her off and guzzles wine from the coffee mug.

For some reason, Gillian’s presence is a balm to her son, and she actually hears him sigh with relief. “Oh, good.”

“Yes. She will prevent me from doing anything rash along the lines of burning down the house, public truancy, streaking—do people still streak? I wonder—and the like.”

Silence. The boy simply did not have a sense of humor.

Gillian gestures for the phone and easily pulls it out of Caroline’s limp grasp. “William? No worries. Got it? I’m on top of the situation like lint on a cheap suit.” She gives the phone back to Caroline.

“What the hell was that?” Caroline hisses at her.

“I dunno.” Gillian shrugs. “I always wanted to say that.”

On the phone, William sighs again as if he were the parent dealing with truant children, “All right.” He says something about a movie later, they might all be home late, he admonishes her about drinking too much, she tells him he should be more concerned about his father’s drinking than her own, and before it can denigrate further into wounding bloody earnestness, she cuts him off with a genuine “I love you” and rings off. She tosses the phone onto the table, sending in into a collision course with the mail, and panics. He said nothing about Kate; surely she was there? If not, was that a good sign or a bad one? Should she have asked him about it? No, it was too much to treat him as if he were a spy enlisted in her nosy, nefarious campaign.

Gillian is frowning at her. “What is it?”

“Nothing. Just contemplating a potential title for John’s roman a clef: _A Spy in the Sapphic House of Love._ How’s that?” She fetches a proper wine glass from the cupboard and expertly pours Gillian’s mug-bound wine into it without wasting a single drop. “Come on, drink up. We’ll come up with a list of titles and submit them to him.”

“Don’t think I’m as creative as you.”

“ _Far from the Twatting Crowd.”_

“Not bad.”

“ _The Mayor of Assterbridge.”_

“Sounds like a porno, that one.”

_“Tess of the Douchervilles!”_

“Are you gonna continue until you run out of Thomas Hardy books?”

“Yes, then I’ll move on to his poems.”

“We’re gonna need another bottle.” Gillian tilts the bottle skeptically. “At least.”

Instead they sit at the kitchen table and allow a mutual, comfortable silence to blossom. Gillian’s fingers drum noiselessly on the belly of her wine glass and Caroline tries to figure out why the hell, all of a sudden, she is inexplicably attracted to this woman; it’s quite a leap from her initial impression of Gillian as a dense, ill-bred, parking-space-stealing twat. Perhaps John was onto something—as painful as it was to admit that—and Gillian was some sort of latter-day Bathsheba Everdene, irresistible to all, including middle-aged lesbians. Thomas Hardy clearly missed an opportunity to liven up his story there, she thinks. Perhaps it’s something inculcated from the day they spent at the hotel, nearly pretending to be lovers; how easily the jest turns real. At least for her. Or later that night when Gillian confessed about Eddie—because murder is such a turn-on, right?—but no, it wasn’t that at all, it was seeing Gillian so vulnerable and revealing something to her that she had never spoken aloud to anyone, and the result was that Caroline now felt so bound to her and so awed by this particular gift of truth that it burnished an already glowing affection. Or perhaps it was a time when they sat too close together in the truck and she noticed how Gillian smelled like woodsmoke and earth and rain—something sharp and clean, something unspoiled. She had succumbed to that scent and dismissed it as mere pheromones, sexual static upon the airwaves, something confusing and troubling and unwanted. Nature was like that, chemistry was like that: Every unavoidable collision and collusion marred whatever pristine plan or perfectly worked out theorem that one had. Perhaps she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps it was because she was nothing at all like Kate and Caroline desperately needed to not think of Kate. It was all the samba beat of perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, that led Caroline to conclude that she really had no fucking idea at all why this was happening. It was everything and nothing.

But to _talk_ of Kate—this, apparently, Gillian wants to do. “Go on.” She’s still tapping the wine glass. 

"Get it out of your system.”

“What?”

“You know what, you knob.”

“Nope.”

“You know you want to.” Gillian raises her eyebrows in a faux-seductive manner; it’s amusing that any time she attempts looking flirty or seductive she comes across as a complete wanker. It’s a curious kind of charm.

Caroline drains her glass. “This way madness lies.”

“Suppose you’re right.” Gillian yields too quickly, a classic feint that allows Caroline to be trussed up by her own inquisitiveness.

For the time being, she resists. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“All right.”

“I saw a film the other night—an old black and white one, maybe from the fifties, sixties, Laurence Harvey was in it—he’s like a secret assassin—”

 _“The Manchurian Candidate_.” Gillian says it with rush of gleeful pride, as if she were a contestant on a quiz show.

“Is that it?”

“Yeah. Was Angela Lansbury in it too?”

“I think so—yeah.”

“She was great in that—so evil. You’d never have thought she’d go on to be Jessica Bloody Fletcher.”

Caroline thinks of the evil mother, the doomed son, the queen of diamonds. Is she Angela Lansbury, empty and alone and flicking through a deck of cards to decide everyone’s fate? She covers her face with both hands, barely breathing behind this mask of flesh and bone, before letting it slip slowly away. “Oh sod it,” she groans. “Tell me, then.”

Gillian takes a generous swig of wine that darkens her lips. “Not much to tell, but what’s there is good. I think. Right off she asked about you. How you were.”

“Ah yes. ‘Is the old roof still leaking when the late snow turns the rain / and by the way, did she mention my name?’”

Gillian looks impressed with her tuneless singing—or perhaps with this unguarded moment.“That’s an old song.”

“Same old song. Different day.” Caroline runs a hand through her hair. “Ah, well. Kate has impeccable manners. So you spoke to her?”

“No. Overheard her with Celia.”

“Oh God. What did _she_ say?”

Gillian attempts to hide her mirth behind the wine glass. “She said you were ‘soldiering on.’”

“Christ.” Caroline seizes the bottle and pours herself more wine. “Your father better marry her quickly before I kill her.” Speaking of impeccable manners: What, she wonders, is the proper etiquette in joking about murder to someone who’s actually committed it? Because Gillian is now wincing, and it’s amazing and shameful how much pain is visible in those arresting eyes. Even at her most guarded, her moods, her thoughts, her entire being always seem magnified through the intensity of that gaze. Even barricaded in silence or disseminated in the most innocuous words, something inside her always seems to be petitioning for release. 

"Shit. I’m sorry.” Caroline lunges across the table and her hand curls around Gillian’s. “I’m so sorry.”

“No. It’s—” Gillian shakes her head. “This thing—it’s always going to be between us now, isn’t it?" She pinches her brow. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“You needed to.”

“No. I didn’t. It’s too much to ask of anyone to hang onto that and bury it.”

“It’s too late for that now. It’s all right. I’m good at keeping secrets. God knows I kept a giant one from myself for so many years.” Caroline repeats it emphatically, and with a tight squeeze of Gillian’s hand: “It’s all right.”

“Is it?” Now Gillian’s eyes are steely, hardened, those of a cornered animal bearing down for a fight. This side of Gillian—the desperate and determined survivor, this, the last thing Eddie Greenwood ever saw in his miserable life—unnerves and almost frightens Caroline, but she won’t let go of Gillian’s hand because this small gesture seems, if only to her, a matter of life and death.

“It is.”

Their clasped hands grow unbearably hot, almost sweaty, and when Caroline loosens her grip Gillian withdraws slowly, reluctantly, and then rolls her shoulders as if sloughing off her misery, a boxer readying for the next brutal round. She seems quickly renewed, jangling with nervous energy—her feet tap the floor and her hands glide skiff-like over her lean thighs for warmth. Caroline thinks of John’s delirious description of her body: that of a sixteen-year-old boy. Hardly. How drunk _was_ he when he slept with Gillian? But there is strength, real strength, in those hands: She could lift a sheep, fix a car, make love, make tea, sooth a child, bash a man’s head in—Caroline closes her eyes for a moment to banish that particular thought—and drink a glass a wine. Her hands encompass a world different and difficult, seemingly more vast and varied than Caroline’s.

“We’re still cool,” Caroline says, and then reluctantly adds the tagline, just so Gillian really knows it to be true, and even though she still has no idea what it fucking means: “Vincent.”

Gillian smiles shyly. “Okay.”

“Drink some more wine.”

“You’re almost out.”

“There’s always another bottle, my dear.”

“If I get pissed, I’ll have to stay here.”

“You can sleep on the couch.”

“I dunno. You leave your door unlocked—if a serial killer were to come in, I’d be the first one he takes out.” Mockingly, Gillian raises her glass. “Hey, look at us now! Joking about murder!”

Caroline bursts into laughter, and is relieved when Gillian follows suit. “We’ve come so far in five minutes!”

“You should be a psychotherapist!”

“Those who cannot fix their own lives muck about in someone else’s.”

“Oh God.” Gillian ducks her head and wraps both hands around the back of her own neck. For one apprehensive moment Caroline panics, worrying that tears are imminent; when it comes to comforting tearful women, her track record is complete rubbish. Frantically she looks around for tissues.

But Gillian merely looks up at her, with an almost tender and pleading regard. “Do you—?” she stops abruptly.

“What?”

Gillian reverts to form: blunt inarticulateness, as she awkwardly scavenges about for the right words in the rag and bone shop of language. “Do you think—I just wonder sometimes, probably more than I should, and not just about you, but, but anybody, really—” She takes a breath. “Do you think you could have done it?”

“I think anyone is capable of it. And in your case—well, God,” Caroline confesses, “I don’t see how I could have avoided it.”

This gets Caroline a very piercing look; the magnitude of Gillian’s glare could cut through the thickest horseshit. “Are you just saying that?”

In turn Caroline spares her a pitying glance. “You should know by now I don’t do the placating thing very well.”

“That’s true.” Gillian pauses awkwardly before delivering a compliment: “That’s what I like about you. Well, one of—many things.”

“Since you are so kind I will permit you the honor of opening the second bottle.” Caroline pauses. “Also, I’m really not good at it.” And also, she assumes—and is correct—that she will receive a frisson of pleasure in merely watching Gillian uncork a wine bottle, for she indeed handles the bottle with the casual, confident ease of some French slattern in a grubby bistro.

They stare at the open bottle with a mixture of reverence and impatience. Caroline settles in to wait. She props her head on folded arms. “It has to breathe,” she declares.

Gillian scowls at the bottle. “How long?”

“Don’t know. Not long.”

Barely a minute passes in silence when Gillian says again, “How long?”

“God, you must have been a terrible child.”

“We could always dig into the scotch.”

“We don’t have scotch.”

“Yeah, you do.” At Caroline’s puzzled look, Gillian continues: “There’s a bottle hid under the sink.” She pauses guiltily. “John told me. I think he was trying to impress me in some weird way.”

“Telling you about his secret alcoholic hoard is impressive?” 

"Yeah, you know, he’s showing what a bad boy he is, getting one over on the wife.”

“Fucking twat.”

“You know it’s good stuff too—Black Bull, I think he said.”

“Giant fucking knob.”

“Forget him. Tonight we claim it for ourselves.” Gillian rubs her hands together. “Let’s go hunting!” Next thing Caroline knows Gillian is splayed out on the floor, rooting around under the sink for the elusive bottle and Caroline wonders what special circle of hell she’s in, where she’s in love with someone who wants nothing to do with her while lusting over a woman who slept with her drunken idiot husband. The t-shirt Gillian wears underneath her plaid shirt has risen slightly, revealing a band of unremarkable pale skin. That she does not glow as radiant as a tanned supermodel is a relief. But desire remains a tyrant—a curious tyrant, waiting to see what dance Salome will perform, what tale Scheherazade will unfurl.

“O shepherdess,” Caroline moans, “bring me my Black Bull!”

“Your pipes leak sometimes?”

“Are you talking about me or the sink?”

Gillian laughs. “The sink. I could fix it.”

“Not now.”

“Only take a second.”

“Focus on the task at hand. Do you see my Black Bull?” 

"Why isn’t it _our_ Black Bull? After all, it was my idea and I’m doing all the bloody work—oh, hang on. That stupid git duct-taped it to a bottom of a drawer.”

“All this trouble—he knows I don’t go anywhere near the underbelly of the sink.”

“Yeah, well.” Gillian’s gleeful ripping of the duct tape undercuts her grim tone. “Drunks are always paranoid. I should bloody know.”

There was no clearly discernible turning point, no boundary that had marked John’s transition from mere heavy drinker to alcoholic. Before their marriage went completely to shit, she could keep up with his drinking, until it became a competition that she had no desire to win. But initially she _had_ wanted to keep up with those Olympian bouts of inebriation, because she foolishly thought it was the key to his creativity and out of equal parts envy and curiosity she wanted to step into that world with him, even if she didn’t remember a damn thing the following day. She bought so completely and so fully into the cliché of the great drunken writer and only later realized she wanted to believe because he did as well. He needed the illusion so desperately, so much so that he created a mystique about it—he sometimes referred to getting pissed as “a pilgrimage to Cythera.”

This little reference was to one of his favorite paintings, Watteau’s _The Pilgrimage to Cythera._ Caroline had always been bored by Watteau’s Rococo flounciness, and this was no exception. But for John the symbolism of the painting meant everything. Were the lovers in the painting setting off for their journey, or just returning from that mysterious island of Cythera, that lovers’ retreat? In time she worked out that Cythera represented for him his own imagination. He was always coming or going—or simply yearning to be there, to be free of the reality that included her.

Gillian is on her feet and holding the dusty scotch bottle aloft. “Black Bull!”

“Well done. You’ve earned yourself the first shot.” Caroline grabs the first mug she encounters—a black one with thick white all-caps proclaiming I’M THE BOSS. A birthday gift from Lawrence that she found sweetly endearing at the time but now seems an excoriating condemnation of character. They stand together at the kitchen counter while Gillian pours a sliver into the mug, toasts her, and knocks it back. Her enjoyment of the shot is predictably erotic: Her eyes close, her face contracts into an almost ugly spasm, her nostrils flare as she greedily inhales air, and as the scotch goes down she is ecstatically resplendent—not exactly St. Teresa, but unerringly beautiful in her own way.

“Jesus Christ,” Caroline sighs. “Do you need a cigarette?”

Gillian grins. “It’s really good.” She pours another shot and gently shoves it in Caroline’s direction. “Go on.”

Caroline is not much of a whisky person. Skeptically, she sniffs the mug.

“Shit, Granny, just kick it back already.”

She shoots Gillian a foul look but does as she’s told. It burns down her throat and she winces but then a most extraordinary aftertaste fills her mouth, warm and sweet and smoky and ripe and overwhelming. It settles in her bones and liquefies her muscles. In John’s pilgrimage to Cythera, the journey had several stages. After embarkation with the bottle there was a long, mellow interlude before the descent that could lead to despair, euphoria, truth, and she wonders now how close she is to that hairpin turn.

“Like it?”

“Yeah. Maybe too much—maybe that’s why John hid it. It’s too tempting to drink the whole bottle in one shot.” Is it possible for it to affect her that quickly? The very air seems honeyed with sweet possibilities. It’s an excuse. She sneaks a look at Gillian, who slouches against the counter, hands tucked into her jeans. A curlicue of paper has corkscrewed its way into her hair. Caroline remembers Lawrence coming in yesterday with a Pepsi bottle and tearing open the wrapper of a plastic straw; together they witnessed the shredded paper drift to the floor like confetti. She hadn’t cared at all. Expecting a reprimand, he had stared blankly at her and clearly did not know if he should be either concerned or outraged at her indifference.

She reaches out and the gesture seems to startle Gillian, who abruptly rears back, like a wary, abused pet. 

"Sorry.” They both say it simultaneously.

“You have something in your hair.” Her fingers comb through Gillian’s tangled hair and the loosened paper dives to the floor. But her hand is helpless in resisting the lure, tired of fighting the battle, and pushes aside that mass of hair to fit snug against the back of Gillian’s neck. It could be interpreted, she hopes, as a simple gesture of affection. Nothing more. But Gillian stiffens at the touch, her body bracing as if she’s pouring another flaming round of scotch in her belly. She closes her eyes. “What’s this?" she murmurs.

What’s this? Caroline wants to say. My hand, my skin on yours—but not my heart, not that broken and troubled thing, that you can do without—here are my veins unraveling a complicated map, just for you.

“Don’t do something you’ll regret,” Gillian whispers.

Her hand slides away, hangs loose and helpless at her side. It’s probably for the best. She has an entire stockpile of regrets. They fill the house. “I wonder if you would regret it.”

“No.” Gillian smiles, eyes still closed. “I wouldn’t.”

The pilgrimage has hit stormy weather. Waves thrash the deck. “I don’t know,” Caroline begins slowly, “quite when it happened—when I noticed your beauty.”

As if Caroline has slapped her, Gillian recoils from the words. She hugs herself. This time when Caroline touches her, it’s purely out of comfort, a light squeeze of Gillian’s forearm. “God. Has no one ever said that to you? Told you you’re beautiful?”

Gillian rubs her eyes. Perhaps tired, perhaps fighting tears. Who was first, who told her she was beautiful? Eddie, of course. He would break her with words, then with fists. The hope was worse than the bruises, is worse with the bruises. Because they are still there, invisible, interleaved with time and skin.

“Yeah, well.” Gillian shrugs off Caroline’s hand, recovers her bravado even though her eyes glimmer with unshed tears, shoves her own hands as deep as she possibly can in those tight jeans. “Heard that one before.”

“Not from me.” If there’s something distinct about this throwaway line that holds meaning for Gillian, Caroline has no idea, but Gillian looks at her strangely as if she’s uttered some profound aphorism, something that easily breaks the stalemate of propriety and the threat of regret. She kisses Caroline quick and hard. It’s like the sudden mash one gets at midnight on New Year’s Eve from a drunken acquaintance long harboring an unrequited crush. Her hand is on Caroline’s cheek and, when no protest is forthcoming, she goes in for a longer, more satisfying kiss—sweet and rich and deeper than Caroline’s hopes had even permitted, her teeth nip at Caroline’s lower lip, and the ship destined to or embarking from Cythera has gloriously, finally surrendered to the waves.

They’re stumbling in the hallway and she trips over the same damned trainers that nearly capsized Gillian earlier—Caroline is currently blaming Lawrence for their appearance as her mind tips into overdrive, desperate for distraction, something to slow down everything rushing by—and, on her knees, she’s laughing. Gillian tries to hoist her up but she manages to pull Gillian down to her level. She tries to imagine how it would look should anyone come waltzing through the—shit, unlocked—door right now: sprawled on the floor in the hallway, her tongue in Gillian’s mouth, her hands digging into her ass, Gillian’s hand gently cupping her breast before sliding down her torso. The problem, if any, is that she simply doesn’t care anymore. After so many years of trying to do the right thing, it is time to try the wrong thing.

Gillian stops kissing her and reluctantly gives her an out: “Do you want to stop?” Her hand is curled into the waistband of Caroline’s pants, primed and ready to unpop and unzip. Her knuckles press gently into Caroline’s belly. Her scent—that distinctive, dizzying woodsy scent that makes Caroline wonders if she possesses some strange lumberjack or park ranger fetish—mingles with the taste of scotch she leaves in Caroline’s mouth.

In response her tongue touches a vein in Gillian’s neck, her mouth sweeps up to kiss her ear. “Go upstairs,” she whispers.


	4. Orpheus was a twat

Caroline emerges from inebriated half-sleep like Orpheus from the underworld: determined not to look back, but helpless in the compunction to do so. She drags both hands over her face and stares at the ceiling, half-coated in a fuzzy trapezoid of peach-colored light from a dim lamp. 

“Shit,” she proclaims, to no one in particular. Even though Gillian is there beside her—as naked as she is but, presumably, sleeping. And if not sleeping, doing a rather fine imitation of it: on her belly and face-planted into a pillow, snuffling softly like an asthmatic puppy—this sound Caroline knows firsthand, courtesy of a former neighbor’s bulldog puppy who indeed made the exact same sound that now emanates from Gillian. Aside from the puppy’s penchant for trouble there is, fortunately, no other resemblance between the two. And if Caroline is indeed Orpheus, then she’s condemned Gillian to the underworld repeatedly with several prior glances, the first few to appreciate certain things—the angle of her shoulder blade, the almost-ogee of her spine leading to the satisfying dip in her lower back, and here Caroline’s hand had flexed with the desire to touch again—and then subsequent looks to express monumental irritation that she appears to sleep so contentedly. 

Orpheus. Now there was a myth she loathed. All he had to do was one simple, small thing: not look back. All he had to do was maintain self-control and but for but a few steps out of the underworld he would have everything. So completely simple, so easy to accomplish, but apparently so easy to fuck up. He was a twat, really, she always thought. 

But now she glares at Gillian again: Speaking of self-control. 

You’ve fucked up, Caroline tells herself. Again. You’re a fuckup. That’s the problem, she thinks. That’s always been the problem. And now a new problem: that it felt so good. The poison is the antidote; the poison is the new infection that flourishes within. She sighs, pulls a sheet up over her body in a reverse strip tease until the 400-thread-count sheet ripples over her face like a drowning wave. Why not just stay here forever and wallow in yet another mistake, another miscalculation? It seems only to add to the magnitude of her failures that she blames alcohol for this; she cannot even take responsibility now like a proper adult. Perhaps she did not fail all the time, that much was certainly true, but failing half the time was not exactly a passing mark. Or maybe life was not like school and this amount of failing and flailing is par for the course and, she wonders, are we not all failing at pretending that we do not fail so much?

It is precisely at this moment she realizes that, as far as critiquing Gillian’s romantic choices, she has definitely lost whatever dubious moral high ground she once possessed. Moral high ground is, for Caroline, exceedingly precious mental real estate. She sighs again, covers her face again—and this time is awake enough to notice the delicate scent of sex upon her hands.

How late is it? How late? She panics. 

She pokes Gillian’s bare shoulder and noisily clears her throat. “Hey. Wake up.” She resists the urge to run her fingers through Gillian’s hair—which, she had been pleased to discover, was surprisingly soft even in its perpetually tangled state, and which now feathers in listless rhythm with her stuffy breathing.

Gillian makes an unappealing grunting noise punctuated by a sigh. 

Caroline tries gently shaking her. “Come on.” 

This time, a grunt and a groan before the sleep-snuffling commences again. 

Largely due to the stark truth that niceness has never helped her achieve anything substantial in life whatsoever, Caroline, as usual, surrenders to blunter tactics. She slides a pillow out from under her own head and whacks Gillian with it—not too hard, she thinks, but then, as John had said once upon a time, she has always underestimated her own physical strength (as a result of an incident where Caroline had, with unerring accuracy, hurled a sizable French dictionary at him), and perhaps the cocktail of emotions that the past few hours has served up—anger, resentment, guilt, shame, lust, desire, and something approximating love and affection—has compelled Caroline to use a tad more force than necessary. 

So while she should not be shocked at Gillian’s reaction, she is: Gillian seizes her wrist in a surprisingly powerful grip and wrenches the pillow away from her, flings it halfway across the room, and glares at her. Unceremoniously, the survivor has returned—breathless, wide awake, and snarling, “Why’d you fucking do that?” 

“It’s getting late. You should go.” Caroline knows how peevishly self-serving and defensive she sounds. She stares at Gillian’s hand, which binds her wrist—marveling at the prolific, recurring threat of violence, ceaselessly replicating and mutating in those it has already ruined—could the same hand that so coaxed pleasure out of her body now strike her? That would be that. That component of danger, of unpredictability, was shamefully attractive—but only up to a certain point. 

Gillian’s grip slackens, releases. Warily she sinks back down onto the bed, awkwardly covering herself with a blanket and defiantly denying Caroline the opportunity to partake in any viewing pleasure of her breasts—at least this is what Caroline, who would attribute nefarious and selfish motives under the most innocuous circumstances to even the Dalai Llama or the Pope, believes. 

“So the regrets have started kicking in already?” she snipes. 

“No,” Caroline lies, unsure. 

Gillian runs a hand through her hair and stares at the ceiling. “But you want me gone.”

Caroline rubs her brow, takes inventory of the scattered clothes along the floor: her bra, her pants, Gillian’s shirt, trainers, jeans, all of it twisted and loosely formed as a lusty archipelago along the bedroom floor. “I’d rather not have to explain to anyone in our family why you are naked and in my bed.” 

Gillian closes her eyes.

Remorse blindsides Caroline. She reaches over to brush Gillian’s cheek with her knuckles—grateful that she is spared the sight of Gillian flinching at an unexpected touch, ashamed of her own cluelessness. “Don't fall asleep again,” she says gently. 

Gillian’s mask-like expression dissipates, softens. “Not my fault your bed is so comfortable.” 

That simply, Caroline is forgiven. “I wish you could stay a bit longer, but it’s getting late.” She pauses. “I’m sorry—for waking you like that. I panicked.”

Gillian opens her eyes and Caroline is momentarily undone by the shift in their coloring, the bold blue slightly darkened and warmed by both the golden light of the room and the pupil’s sensual expanse. “Talk to me,” she pleads softly. “It’ll help me wake up.” 

It’s a child’s emotional blackmail, but just as Caroline could not resist her children’s blatant yet more endearing subterfuges, apparently she cannot resist Gillian’s either. “About what?”

“Anything you want.”

“Well, because you are acting so pliable and I find it strange and strangely attractive on you—”

“‘Strangely’?”

“Because most of the time you’re a glorious sullen bitch.” 

Gillian squints at her. “Your pillow talk leaves something to be desired.” 

“No no, I like you—like that. So tell me, I’m curious. I gather this is not your first time at the rodeo.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Gillian laughs lightly and turns over on her belly again, tucks her arms under her head. “No. It’s not. Been a long time, though.”

“When?”

“Dunno. I was about 14, 15.”

Blinking in shock, Caroline thinks of herself at that age: nose always in a book, worried about wearing the right clothes, worried about her weight, and dreaming of Cambridge, Oxford, any escape from the prison of home. She had even contemplated going to school in America—and would have, had her parents not been so bloody-minded and intent on keeping her as close as possible. Apparently Gillian had dispensed with the typical minutiae of adolescence and was getting abortions, banging both sexes, and doing God knows what else; at this rate Caroline wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she had conducted bank heists or hijacked airliners in her long, misguided youth. “Really? Who?”

Gillian yawns. “Hebden Bridge hippies.”

“Well, that just explains it all, doesn’t it? More than one? Was there an _orgy_?”

“Just two. Not at the same time, mind. Just at, you know, various times, when I would run into them. One had a boyfriend—she let him watch once.” A pause. “I didn’t like that.” 

“They were older?”

“University students.”

“Did they seduce you by reading their theses to you?”

“You are bloody hilarious.” 

“No, just—it’s all pretty heady stuff for a teenager.” 

“Hedy Lamarr,” Keen to avoid the subject in detail, Gillian riffs. Her eyelids droop dangerously. 

“Did you know Hedy Lamarr was an inventor? She helped come up with frequency-hopping spread spectrum, you know—it’s a modulation technique in radio transmission, switching frequencies to avoid signal jamming.”

“You are a marvel of information.” Gillian blinks several times, as if banishing both sleep and sarcasm. “Seriously, that is interesting,” she admits. 

“See, that’s the kind of reaction I like. I told this to Lawrence and he looked at me as if I had two heads.” 

“He’s just going through a very cunty phase right now.” 

They laugh and Caroline thinks this is the most dangerous thing that has occurred all evening long: The familiar intimacy of lying in bed and talking about children. Just like a real couple, just as she had done a thousand times with John and had wanted to do a thousand more with Kate. Apparently she cannot trust her mind to avoid treacherous emotional traps any more than she can trust her body to resist temptation. It doesn’t help that Gillian is looking at her very steadily, with the curious, alert repose of a cat. “We can’t do this again,” she whispers. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Gillian says it in the same flat, resigned tone she used when numbly agreeing with Caroline that she shouldn't see Robbie anymore—which indicates that she has no intent whatsoever of paying attention to a single Cassandra-like portent from Caroline. 

Caroline is accustomed to this. She’s heard it manifold times before, this mindless, mollifying assent—from her sons, her husband, her students, her teachers. But here and now, the urgency is to be denied at the risk of consequences too dire to be properly imagined. 

“Shit, Gillian. I’m serious,” she says helplessly. Foolishly—the idiot moth to the flame, the arrogant adventurer to the whirlwind, the sorority girl in a horror movie to the locked bloody door—she moves closer to Gillian and guides unruly hair away from her face, tucking it behind an ear. 

“I know,” Gillian mumbles again. Their lips are too close and she kisses Caroline while saying it, breathing into her mouth these simple syllables that resurrect desire, as if saying, I know you. I know what you want. 

Caroline breaks it off. “Oh Christ, don’t do this.” 

In response Gillian only kisses her deeper, in such a soft, slow, and messy way that the wonderful ache between her legs returns.

“Oh Christ,” Caroline repeats. “You’re not being serious at all.” 

“No,” Gillian admits in between kisses. “I'm not.”

“Vincent, _this is not cool._ Vincent, we have a _problem.”_

“I’ll say. You're mixing up your movies now.” Gently she pushes Caroline onto her back. Their bodies fit together with surprising ease. Her hands and her mouth feel as if they are everywhere. Earlier Caroline had noted—rather, quickly succumbed to—this focused, aggressive intensity, as if Gillian is somehow fucking not to save her own life but to create something new out of it all, something that will dispense with and unravel the damage of the past, all those knotted-up memories broken into harmless finery, crushed and buried into dull silt underneath that glittering and all-consuming, but always fleeting, moment of pleasure. “Just one more time. All right?” She’s positioned between Caroline’s legs and is grinding against her in a particularly pleasing manner that sends Caroline backstroking for the headboard. 

But Caroline stiffens when she notices that Gillian’s kisses appear to be tracking southward. “You don’t—have to do that—“

Gillian looks up at her quite innocently. “I want to. I’ve been told I’m good at it.” 

Caroline bursts into ribald laughter. “Oh yes, all of—what, 30 years ago? Did the hippies give you a certificate? Some kind of licensing that never expires?” 

A sheepish grin from Gillian acknowledges the ludicrousness of it. “Shut your gob.” She shifts, sliding half off the disappointed Caroline, leaving their legs tangled together. ”All right, look, it’s been a while, but it’s not exactly brain surgery, you know. I want to.” This time she looks almost embarrassed; it’s terribly endearing. “You made me feel—really good. It’s like—” Gillian props her head on her hand and dismally Caroline realizes she’s in for a long ramble. “—like sometimes when you need a coffee, and you have one and you think, ‘This is all right, this is just I need, this’ll get me through,’ and then, like, on your birthday or maybe you’ve had a bad day or something you decide to have a cappuccino with all this stuff in it, you know, cinnamon and chocolate and whipped cream and the like and you think, ‘Shit, why don’t I have this every day?’ and you know the reason why is because you’ll gain weight but—”

Caroline frowns. “You’re not telling me I’m fat, are you? Or that I’m going to _get_ fat?” 

“What? No, you fucking knob. You’re beautiful. You’re a beautiful idiot because you missed the point _entirely._ It’s a metaphor.”

“It’s a shit metaphor because all I heard was ‘chocolate and cinnamon’ and it’s made me hungry.” 

Gillian shakes her head. “You really can’t take a compliment, can you?” 

There’s no arguing with that, Caroline knows. Instead, she jokes. “Your gentlemen callers must be falling down on the job.” 

The perfect response to this, Gillian decides, is to absently trace Caroline’s jawline with a thumb.

“I’m not good at—being on the other end of it,” Caroline admits. “I have a long history as a control freak—big surprise, I know. So that doesn’t help. And I’m always distracted. Well, sometimes. Well, a lot. Can’t settle my mind.” 

Kate had thought music would help. Prince, of course. The falsetto vocals of “Kiss” always sent Caroline into giggles; “Little Red Corvette” made her think of car commercials and how she yearned to buy a Mini Cooper; “Raspberry Beret” just seemed a very unfortunate fashion accessory; “When Doves Cry” reminded her of a dead pigeon she had spotted on the school grounds and had forgotten to tell the maintenance staff about; and the guitar solo at the end of “Let’s Go Crazy” made her tense up and pull a muscle in her back. Alas, their relationship had terminated before Kate could happily experiment on her further with Marvin Gaye or Nina Simone or, God forbid, some autotuned nightmare of a contemporary singer. But now she is back to being a sexual lab rat for some well-meaning lover. 

“You need to shut off your mind and relax,” Gillian says. 

“Yes, thank you, Zen Master. No one’s ever recommended that before. I’m not like that—how can I put this in terms you would understand?”

Gillian kisses her arm, her shoulder, nuzzles her neck. “Well, you could try being a bit more condescending. That’s really helpful.” 

“No, no, wait—” Like an avid pupil in class, she raises her hand. “I’ve got it. You’ll like this one. It’s like that Woody Allen movie—I forget the title, of course—where Liam Neeson is going down on some woman—what’s her name?—and she can’t bloody stop thinking of nonsense—God, the camera movement made me nauseous—I had to go in the lobby and drink ginger ale for a half hour and John was pissed at me later for ruining his ‘cinematic experience.’”

“ _Crime and Misdemeanors,”_ Gillian kisses her, and then scowls at herself. “Wait. No. That’s wrong.” 

“ _Match Game? Match Point_?” Caroline speculates between further kissing and furious neck biting. “If you leave any visible marks on me, I’m going to kill you.” 

“Don’t you have any turtlenecks? But no, that’s not right either.”

“Wasn’t there one about time travel in Russia or something? With a bunch of sisters?” 

“Right now you’re mixing up about three different films.” Gillian sighs with frustration—neither the trivia portion of the evening nor the attempt at a very specific kind of pleasuring are going her way. But she is nothing if not stubbornly persistent and once again tops Caroline with very clear intent. True to form Caroline panics, anticipating her usual difficulties in surrendering to ecstasy—quite suddenly she thinks of Burke’s treatise on the sublime and the beautiful, and all the terrors that sublimity can engender, and yes, isn’t that the problem? Shit. Why was she thinking this? 

Which translates to: “Shit. Why are we talking about this?” she gasps. 

“You started it,” Gillian reminds her, before driving the point further as she slides down along Caroline’s body, documenting her descent with kissing, licking, and biting. 

Caroline thinks of mountainclimbing—well, why not? An entirely new way to sabotage herself. 

“You started the whole bloody thing.” There seems to be real anger behind the accusation. 

Caroline feels like Kilimanjaro: Vast, verboten, and capable of driving the most determined explorer to despair or death. Still, she is fundamentally herself and won’t allow the inaccuracy to pass. “You know that’s not true,” she says softly.

Abruptly Gillian stops everything. She presses her face against Caroline’s skin, into the slight, vulnerable hollow just below Caroline’s rib cage, as if she wants to hibernate there. “I know.” She reaches upward. Her fingers find Caroline’s lips, her thumb traces the meeting point of both lips, demanding entry with such insistence that Caroline yields quickly and takes the thumb in her mouth. Her tongue flicks roughly against the tip, her teeth long to burrow into bone, and she is dimly aware of Gillian saying, in some low, lush tone, how beautiful she is. Like the mindless chatter leading up to the inevitable truth, the physical distraction works and when Gillian’s mouth finds the juncture of her thigh and her torso, Caroline gasps, imagining the femoral pulse point leaping under her skin—a bounding quixotic fox along a red road, evasive in the hunt. 

All the gears in her mind grind to a halt, all the nonsense spools out of her head, and all she is aware of is the ambient murmur of the house—the furnace whirring and clicking, the lamp buzzing. And breathing. Her breathing, Gillian’s breathing, converging and matching in rhythm, and it lulls her into a calm oblivion. Maybe that’s all the music she ever needed: The deceptively simple concerto of breathing. Sex enters stealth mode, as a counterpoint. A gradual paralysis sets in; her limbs tense against the slightest shivers of anticipation and everything seems slow and fast at once, maddeningly erratic and building toward something, something that she is in tune with—she’s finally found the right piece of music and her body follows every keen shift in tempo, every scrambling escalation, all the notes of this silent symphony clotting together into an ecstatic jumble, and when it all breaks apart into a final ascent she gives in beautifully. 

God bless the hippies, she thinks afterward. And even though she’s afraid Gillian is falling asleep on top of her—her head heavy against Caroline’s belly, her hand curled around Caroline’s hip—she’s simply too tired and too sated not to follow suit. 

When she wakes, Gillian is gone. The bathroom light is on, a perfect rectangle of brightness in the dark that bids her entry, a penitent lured into a sacred hall. Beads of water dot the sink and a new dirty towel sits bundled in the hamper. She hadn't expected Gillian to be so tidy. But after she washes up and throws on pajamas, she goes downstairs to discover that Gillian has whitewashed the scene of the crime: The lights are out, the door is locked, glasses and mugs are washed, the neglected bottle of wine stoppered and in the fridge, and the Black Bull once again resides triumphantly in its rightful spot in the liquor cabinet. 

After running the glorious gamut of the alphabet in this sexual sequence, she’s back to point A, sitting on the couch in the dark. Like some phantom projection of the Nile, a nacreous sheen of light flows up the wall.


	5. arsenic bloody cappuccino (conclusion)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter. Many thanks to folks for reading! Any comments and so forth are appreciated. There is a sequel/companion piece in the works, so hopefully you all may be interested in that as well. Or not!

Lawrence yawns dramatically over a bowl of oatmeal. Caroline presses her hand between his shoulder blades, intending to rub with the vigorous affection she has always given him, the kind of borderline roughhousing he’s always enjoyed, but he recoils from her touch and huddles into a defensive ball like a gormless earthworm poked by a stick.

 

“Better boring than drunk,” she reminds him.

 

He rolls his eyes, pulls out a phone, and is lost to her once again.

 

She sits down across from him at the kitchen table, glaring for good measure, before unfurling a newspaper. Nearly a week—more like four days, but Caroline isn’t counting, or so she tells herself—has passed since the Incident. She refers to it as “the Incident” in the privacy of her mind, although given the exclusivity of the content she could quite easily think of it as “the Scotchy Shagfest”; that would certainly be more fitting, and no one would be the wiser. She curses her mind’s demure tendencies, even though the easy and pleasurable recollection of certain acts that night remains a source of trouble.

 

Gillian has maintained a steady radio silence: no phone calls, no texts, no sexts—not that she ever did _that_ before the Incident, of course, but Caroline has no idea what to expect now that the genie has been uncorked. This lack of communication is only noticeable between the two of them; the cast of characters in their narrow little world spin on regardless, caught up in their own concerns and dramas. With each passing day, Caroline is more confident that the Incident can be put solidly behind them—that in time it will develop into a sweet memory, the source of a shared, secretive smile from across a room, maybe something to confess on her deathbed. Although the only person she would want to confess such a thing to is her mother, if only to see the old woman’s head explode. Well, not really, but it is good to have insane, unimaginable goals in life—how easily she convinces herself of this—if only to put more realistic ones in perspective.

 

She hears Celia in the living room, chatting at William. Over the years she's become adept at blocking out her mother’s voice when sanity requires, and so Celia’s presence is reduced to a white noise that blends in with the posh TV announcer in the background and whatever game Lawrence is playing on his phone—lots of crashing noises and a rock score that sounds like it’s been lifted from some old American crime drama like _Miami Vice._ So she sips coffee and peruses what passes as local news: Specifically, a story about a farmer whose corgi had twelve puppies and they all survived, _what a miracle,_ the farmer's idiot wife says, _aren't they all dear_ , why, she could get a puppy, surely it would be easier, she thinks, to care for than children or a husband or a lover or some stupid daft woman who works on a sheep farm, and goddamn her and all her problems anyway, and goddamn the memory of her hands and mouth, her fingers digging into my skin and the way she kissed, as if she were drowning—

 

Then she notices that Celia stands in front of her, mysteriously imperious and erect as Ahab readying for battle with the white whale, which implies that she and Lawrence are Ishmael and Queequeg (Lawrence would have to be Queequeg, she thinks) or crewmembers of even lesser import hanging about in a stupor of dread. “Well?  Can you?” she demands.

 

Caroline blinks. “What?”

 

“Caroline, _have you been listening to a single word I've said?_ I need to go into town. Could you drive me?”

 

“I suppose—is Alan all right?”

 

“Oh, he’s fine. Still pottering about in his robe and reading the _Guardian_.” She shudders. “He could do with a day of rest, I think. Do you mind? I’ve just a few things to tend to at the florist. It shouldn’t take long.” Turning on her heel, she exits without waiting for the response that she clearly expects.

 

Defeated, she tosses the paper onto the table and rises. Lawrence smirks at her.  “Mum,” Caroline shouts, “shall we bring Lawrence along?”

 

He stiffens in fear.

 

“Oh good Lord, no,” Celia calls back from the hallway. “I’m sure he’d be bored stiff.”

 

Lawrence wriggles his fingers in mocking goodbye. Caroline flips him off. He bursts into giggles. She smiles and shakes her head, mystified at having achieved a bizarre, unintended détente with her inscrutable son.

 

Minutes later they’re on the road. Celia turns on the radio. It’s a vigorous, slightly sinister string quartet that, apparently, neither of them are in the mood for. Immediately Celia turns it off. “Bloody Shostakovich,” she mutters.

 

Kate liked Shostakovich. God knew why. She never had the chance to discover the reason, to plunge those unfathomable depths that she could have spent a lifetime mining. How poorly one knows the people one claims to love. In some respects she knows Gillian better. But she isn’t in love with Gillian. At least—no, she thinks. It couldn’t be. But Caroline’s mind is always its very own debate team, weighing pros and cons, and so the question ricochets around pointlessly from every conceivable angle—pros: she’s great in bed and can fix things, cons: she’s an emotional fucking mess.

 

She could go on interminably but Celia has tired of the silence: “Are you all right?” her mother asks, with the utmost solicitousness. A bright, penetrating gaze fixes on Caroline, a kind of maternal hypnosis that Caroline routinely employs on her sons; she’s always learned from the best.

 

When it’s turned on her, however, she is always as rattled as a teenager. “What? I’m fine. Why?”

 

“You seem a little distracted lately.”

 

“It’s a busy time of year.”

 

“I’m aware.” Celia pauses.  “Caroline, if I’ve done something wrong, tell me. You aren’t—well, you aren’t upset at Kate still being involved in the wedding, are you? I thought you’d be all right with it, but if you aren’t, just say so.”

 

“You’ve done nothing wrong.”

 

“You’re certain? This isn’t some sort of reverse psychology, or a test—”

 

“How insidious you think I am!”

 

Celia smiles wryly. “You’re my daughter. Of course I know how insidious you are.”

 

“Seriously. Everything is all right. I’m fine.”

 

“You keep saying that, but—”

 

“All right, how about this—will you accept this: I _will_ be fine.”

 

“That’s more honest, certainly.” Resigned, Celia sighs and is quiet for what seems an eternity before saying, apropos of nothing: “So Gillian fixed your pipes, did she?”

 

The vehicle swerves. Celia squawks in alarm.

 

“Sorry,” Caroline lies. “I saw a badger.”

 

“What?” Celia looks back. “I didn’t see anything—”

 

Caroline puts on her best headmistress voice. “Well it’s a good thing you don’t drive often, isn’t it?”

 

“I suppose not!” Celia is still rubbernecking after the imaginary badger. “So Gillian took care of that for you?”

 

“Um, yes—it seems all fixed.”

 

Her mother turns around. “Oh, good. She said fixing it was quite simple and that all you needed was a good screw.”

 

Violently Caroline bites the inside of her cheek, white-knuckles the steering wheel, and risks a glance at her mother, just to verify that the old woman was not completely fucking with her. Placidly innocent, Celia stares contentedly at the bleak landscape like a grandmother in a biscuit commercial awaiting a visit from the kiddies. No, obviously it’s Gillian who is fucking with her. All right, she thinks, I’m taking back all the sort-of-nice things I’ve thought about you—but still keeping the three orgasms you gave me.

 

“Gillian is, you know, very useful at times. She’s quite handy.” This is part of Celia’s active new campaign to appreciate her future stepdaughter, to focus on Gillian’s good qualities and not the litany of dubious activities like abortion and sexual escapades, and character flaws like her ill temper, foul mouth, and mediocre tea-making skills. She did, however, seem quite impressed with Gillian’s ability to lift sheep; it appeared a massive step forward in the Gillian Rehabilitation Project.  

 

Caroline clears her throat. “Yes. She is.”

 

“I’m glad you two get on so well now,” Celia says. “I know it was a bit touch-and-go at first.”

 

Sleeping with her has really helped! Caroline wants to say. “Yeah, it’s good—it’s all good now.”

 

In town, parking is even scarcer than usual. Caroline is about to do another round of the block near the florist when Celia commands, “Park in the alley.”

 

“You know I can’t do that.”

 

“Maybe. But Alan says he does it all the time and never gets caught. Go on, give it a try.”

 

She sighs. “You’re just going to nag me until I do it, aren’t you?”

 

“Basically, yes.”

 

“Fine.” Caroline surrenders and backs into the narrow, dark alley. It appears the perfect secluded locale for a murder. Suspiciously, she regards her mother.

 

“Very good.” Celia opens the door. “Now stay here.”

 

Irritated, Caroline wrinkles her nose. “Why?”

 

“Well, just in case the police come and want to tow you—”

 

“I thought this alleged parking space was perfect.”

 

“Well,” Celia admits guiltily, “Alan did get towed once—or twice—”

 

Caroline touches her forehead to the steering wheel. “Christ’s sake, Mum. Now I’m left in the car like a dog.”

 

“Don’t be so dramatic. Just stay here, I won’t be that long. Also I know if you come into the shop with me Francis will be all over you and we’ll be there _forever._ He’s very excited that you’re gay now.” Celia issues a martyr’s sigh.

 

“Did you take out an announcement in the paper or something?”

 

“They don’t do that sort of thing. Don’t be silly.” Celia steps out of the vehicle, but hesitates before closing the door. “Do they?”

 

“Go,” Caroline barks.

 

Celia raises an eyebrow. “‘I’m the Boss,’ indeed.”

 

“And don’t quote a bloody coffee mug at me!”

 

Her mother rolls her eyes and slams the door shut.

 

Caroline watches her march away. She sighs, stares at traffic, and waits for some surly parking attendant to apprehend her. Minutes crawl by. Fuck it, she thinks, and wonders if she should give up her post and go in quest for tea somewhere. Or a coffee. Alcohol is tempting. Alcohol is always tempting these days, she realizes—this, despite how much trouble getting sort-of-pissed has led to recently. She sighs and glances at her watch, then at her phone. No sooner does she tuck it away inside her coat than it pings forlornly, like a ship’s radar announcing a stealthy submarine attack.  

 

In fact, it’s far worse than a submarine attack. It’s a text from Gillian: _Where are you?_

 

 _Machu Picchu._ Caroline sends sarcasm whizzing into the ether.

 

The next text is chastising: _You're not as funny as you think you are._

_Kate used to say that._ Caroline hates being the sad sack, but can’t help it.

 

Gillian gets bold: _Bugger Kate._

 

Before she can even attempt a cheeky reply, a follow-up text: _dont say you already have thats too predictible for the likes of you_

 

Apparently with longer texts Gillian gives up on any semblance of punctuation or spelling. Still unable to fashion any kind of coherent or witty response, Caroline merely stares at the screen until a single word crops up: _Coffee?_ Almost as alarmingly appealing as if she had just texted, _Sex?_ Would a text that merely says “sex” still count as a sext? It’s a linguistic conundrum for a brave new world she wants nothing to do with.

 

Caroline would slam the phone against the dash save for the restraint of the seat belt, which she struggles against as if she were an oversized toddler; she settles for the quite modern self-flagellation of angrily slapping the phone against her thigh. No no no, she thinks. It was a one-off, a mistake, something that must not happen again, something that would not have happened save for their mutual misery intersecting at just the right—or wrong—time. She becomes acutely aware of the repressive seat belt: She’s Ulysses, lashed to the mast and resisting the song of the sirens. She’s breathing heavily, almost hyperventilating, and tricking herself into thinking that she has somehow stupidly precipitated a heart attack—God, what a relief that would be, a near-death experience to get out of the wedding and Kate might, just might, even feel sorry for her and deign to visit her in the hospital, and that’s all she needs, really, just one little emotional toehold, yes, she is that manipulative, especially when it comes to the one thing that means everything—when a deeper, darker instinct assuages her with its insistent blackness. It’s just coffee, she thinks. Even though the flimsy shroud of recent memory gauzily reveals how dangerous only one shared libation can be. But, she realizes, she cannot avoid Gillian forever. Hitting the release for the seat belt, she sucks in one long greedy breath.

 

 _When?_ Caroline types. She expels the breath into the outer world, into nothingness.

 

Ten minutes later the passenger door opens and Gillian extends a paper cup to Caroline as if it were an Olympic torch.

 

Caroline stares at the offering. “I feel as if you are stalking me.”

 

“Because I have so much free time to do that, yeah? Take the cup,” Gillian demands.

 

Suspicious, Caroline takes it and sniffs. “What is it?”

 

“Arsenic bloody cappuccino.”

 

“Well, I don’t smell arsenic, so you’re lying.”

 

Gillian flops into the passenger seat and closes the door. “Are you saying you’re disappointed?”

The collar of her jacket is upturned, creating a shadowed and imposing border above those fierce blue eyes and a nose pink with cold. Absently she rakes her hair, which had been whipped wild by the wind, sips her own coffee, and blinks innocently at Caroline.

 

Of course, she has to be so plainly, stupidly attractive in her way that Caroline cannot help it. “No,” she replies softly. “I’m not disappointed.”  The coffee is warm and milky, strangely sweet. Maybe it was spiked with something; maybe she would end up a sex slave on a sheep farm. It would, at least, be a change of pace. “How did you know I was here?”

 

“I’m a bloody psychic.”

 

“If so, you should be making a lot more money. Unless you’re a bad one.”

 

“I’m a bad one,” Gillian says, a touch morosely.

 

Don’t I fucking know it, Caroline wants to say, but does not want to spoil this attempt at normal conversation.

 

“Saw your car. Saw Celia get out.”  Already Gillian has inhaled the entire cup of coffee and gently crumples the cup in her hand. “Do you know you’re illegally parked?”

 

“Oh, piss off. It’s thanks to your father’s bright idea that I’m here and about to get towed.”

 

Gillian smiles. “Yeah, this is one of his more dubious tricks.”

 

“Even you agree it’s dubious? That’s saying something, given the way you drive. And park.”

 

“Shut it, you twat.” So far they are back on course. “So what’s your mum up to?”

 

“Do you know—I have no idea? I thought the flower arrangements were settled. But apparently not. Perhaps she wants to add angels dancing on the heads of pins, whirling dervishes, I don’t know.”

 

“All this work for one single day,” Gillian sighs, stares at the crushed paper cup, and shoves it into her coat pocket. Caroline winces.  “So my dad—is he OK?”

 

“He’s fine. I saw him this morning as we were leaving. I waved at him. Mum has him on lockdown. She’s worried he’s running around a bit too much.”

 

“Well.” Gillian slowly rubs her hands for warmth. “I guess—she does take care of him.”

 

“She does.”  Caroline stares at the coffee. “What’s in this?”

 

“It’s hazelnut something.”

 

“Not bad.”

 

“I thought you’d like it.”

 

“Are you working today?”

 

“Yeah. Later.” Gillian smiles ruefully. “I had to get out of the house for a while, this morning. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a baby around 24/7.”

 

“You’ve forgotten because we’ve both lost valuable brain cells while home alone with young children.”

 

Gillian slouches and rubs her forehead. “Sometimes I just cannot wrap my head around it. Being a grandmother.  For fuck’s sake.”

 

Caroline laughs. “You certainly don’t sound like a grandmother.”

 

“There’s no use saying I’m not prepared for it because that really doesn’t matter. Does it?”

 

“No. I know I won’t be prepared for it either.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

So-called normal conversation withers. With no small bit of amusement, Caroline watches the restless Gillian squirm, imagining her as a fantastic flip book come to life: She slouches again, stretches her legs, wiggles her feet, jackknifes into a more attentive pose by sitting up straight, crosses her legs, and then uncrosses them. Even stock-still and poised as if she’s about to do a runner—which Caroline is fervently hoping she will do—her fingers waver silently above the door handle, like a magician bidding the door to open.  

 

Caroline thinks about the giant, guilty breath of relief she will expel once Gillian’s gone, and thinks that maybe, just maybe, she will finally stop thinking about shagging this woman. She will join a gym or a nunnery or run for public office or run away to Bangladesh and help the poor while wearing a very attractive frayed linen cowl a la Angelina Jolie. She will do all these things and more to atone for her stupid, craven sex-driven selfishness if only, this one time, God above will grant her escape.

 

“Oh, by the way.” Gillian pauses to nibble upon a thumbnail. “Wanted to ask, before I go—”

 

Caroline hums expectantly and prays for her to open the door.  “What?”

 

“D’you want to have it off again?”

 

Caroline stares in shock. Gillian grins—it’s lovely and cheeky and sexy, or so Caroline might think under different circumstances. Instead, she’s furious, so furious she must put down her coffee in order to gesticulate properly. “Oh, you bloody-minded _twat._ We were _so close_ to completing a normal conversation!”

 

“Yeah, I know. It was bugging me.”

 

“Bugging you?” Caroline hates the fact that she is screeching. “What’s to bug? What’s to talk about? You can’t be serious.”

 

“Yeah, I can.”

 

“I should have known you’d bring this up—”

 

“—because I knew you’d be content to just pretend it never happened, which seem crazier to me than anything I’ve said so far, frankly.”

 

“You want to debate stupid and crazy things? You’ll win every time. What about the _stupid_ thing you said to my mother about me ‘just needing a good screw?’”

 

“Ha!” Of course, Gillian is ridiculously pleased with her schoolboy prank. “She said it to you then, eh?”

 

“What the hell is wrong with you? What are you, twelve years old? She’s not that tone deaf. If she weren’t completely arse over tit about this stupid wedding, she would’ve been grilling me relentlessly about who I’d been shagging and why you knew about it.”

 

Gillian shrugs apologetically. “All right, all right. Sorry.”

 

“That is the _worst apology ever._ Look, I told you we can’t—it can’t happen again.”

 

Of course, Gillian asks the most dangerous question, and with a maddening kind of naiveté: “Why not?”

 

“Because you are _insane_ and we are _stepsisters_ now.” Caroline then wonders: Perhaps the second item should precede the first in importance?

 

“No one has to know,” Gillian retorts softly.

 

She wonders how many times, over how many years, Gillian has said this to someone. “Jesus Christ.” Caroline shakes her head. “You make it sound so easy.”

 

Resembling an advertisement for a motivational speaker or a Conservative politician with a grand vision of a pastoral, white England, Gillian stares seriously, almost nobly, into the distance. She’s about to accuse Gillian of watching too much TV when she says to Caroline, earnestly, “It can be. It could be.”

 

“But—why do you want this?”

 

“You’re kidding, right? It was good. I mean, really good. Why give that up right away?”

 

Caroline harrumphs.

 

“Don’t bullshit me.” Gillian leans back to take advantage of the headrest. She gives Caroline that maddeningly lazy, sexy grin again.

 

“Okay, fine—it was good. Great. Bloody fantastic.” Her neck tingles; the heat of memory touches her face. “But I never thought you’d be interested in repeating it. Well, not really, anyway. We were a little drunk, maybe you were curious, maybe you thought you owed me—” Foolishly, Caroline realizes too late that she’s waded into dangerous territory.

 

With the careful menace of a predator who hears the far-off snapping of a twig, Gillian slowly lifts her head from the headrest. She straightens. Her hands splay atop her thighs. Each careful movement seems designed to curb a naturally furious temperament.  “Owed you what, exactly?”

 

“Nothing. Never mind.” 

 

“No. Say what you mean.”

 

“You think—I don’t know what you’re thinking, it’s just speculation, the way my mind works. But maybe it’s possible? Maybe you think you owe me something—” She stops, softens her tone. “—because I know about Eddie.”

 

“Oh.” Curiously, Gillian stares at her hands.

 

Perhaps wondering, Caroline speculates, if she can get away with strangulation in broad daylight. She cannot help but dig herself in deeper. “I can’t help but think—”

 

“No, wait. Let me get it straight here.” Gillian takes a deep breath. “You think that, like a whore, like some fucking _slag,_ I slept with you to buy your silence? Is that it?”

 

“No,” Caroline replies wearily. “Just, forget it. Forget I said anything. I don’t know what I mean.” This much is true.

 

“Then what is it, Caroline?” Gillian’s tone escalates from quiet fury to a louder, unbridled rage. “You think I pity you, maybe? That’s not much better, thinking I bestow fucks on any poor old sod with a sob story? That I just spread my legs for anyone who asks?” She laughs bitterly. “Well, this is just fucking great. Didn’t know you thought so highly of me. I shouldn’t be surprised.”

 

“That’s not what I meant.” Caroline pinches her brow.

 

Gillian shakes her head. “You really are too fucking much.”

 

What Caroline has wanted for many long minutes finally happens: Gillian pops open the door. The only problem is that Caroline no longer wants her to leave, at least not under present circumstances. Frantic, she lunges across the seat, catches the arm of the door, and pulls it shut. She hangs on to the handle, her arm in place as a seat belt blocking Gillian’s exit. In an attempt to get her to release the door, Gillian’s knees push up and batter awkwardly, half-heartedly, against this human barricade.

 

“Wait,” Caroline pleads.

 

When the knees proved ineffectual, Gillian slaps her arm; the thickness of her coat absorbs the sting. “Fuck off,” she growls.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Sorry? Look, I know I’m not some virginal milkmaid or whatever, but I sleep with who I want _because I want to_. All right?”

 

“All right!” Caroline shouts. “I just want to know why me, why now—”

 

“Ask yourself.” Gillian grinds it out between clenched teeth.

 

“I _have,_ and I’ve got no bloody idea!”

 

“Neither do I!” In another enraged yet futile effort to escape, Gillian grasps the sleeve of her coat, as if tugging on it will release the human seat belt.  

 

“For Christ’s sake, will you knock it off and settle down? I just want to talk to you.”

 

Gillian releases her and throws out one final insult—“bitch”—for good measure.

 

“That’s not helping.”

 

They are both breathless and punch-drunk as boxers in the last round.

 

“You want know what it was? What it is? Maybe, just maybe,” Gillian says slowly, defiantly, “I liked seeing you weak enough to want me. You’re not as all powerful as you think you are. Maybe I just wanted to see the mighty Caroline Elliot on her knees.”

 

Every angry breath between them colludes toward the subversive act of kissing. And before Caroline knows it she gives in, ever obedient to the whiplash of blood sadistically sharp under her skin, kissing Gillian as hard as she did that night when she was so desperate to taste and know every inch of her, delighting then and now in how quickly Gillian yields: Her mouth opens, her hand tight and hot on the back of Caroline’s neck, the swirling ridges of her fingerprints leave testament upon Caroline’s skin. Caroline releases the door, her hand curls around the inside of Gillian’s thigh, and Gillian hums sweetly into her mouth. Time—at least Caroline’s obsessive documentation of it—takes a time out. Until a car horn, comically shrill, breaks the spell. Abruptly Caroline pulls back, knocking the rear view mirror askew with her head, and looks around at the street facing them—hoping not to see her mother collapsed in a dead faint on the street, or a parking cop scowling at her in disapproval, or masses of onlookers with mobiles, all recording the moment for potential upload to “the WhoTube,” as Alan calls it. Traffic and life stagger on, indifferent to the mad snogging of two middle-aged women.

 

She retreats to the safety of the driver’s side and pounds the steering wheel with her fist—something she instantly regrets the moment her hand starts to throb. “Shit,” she hisses.

 

She looks at Gillian, transformed—who exudes the regal calm of victory, as munificent as Henry V at Agincourt with the great battle won and the crown of France within reach. She even has the nerve to smile secretively, a Mona Lisa twist to her serene and sensual mouth, a small acknowledgment of heady disbelief.  If Caroline thought previously that Gillian was composed solely of nerves and feelings and instincts—and she did—this demonstration of perspicacity and persistence surely undermines that ill-formed collection of impressions. She knows how to play the long game, how and when to risk it all, and most importantly, how to undo Caroline with her boldness.

 

“God damn it all.” Caroline rests her forehead against the steering wheel and closes her eyes. “What is it about you?”

 

“Me?” Gillian is incredulous. “What is it about _you_? Why do you have to look so bloody good in a skirt?”

 

In spite of everything, Caroline is minutely pleased with this particular blame game. “So that’s your great weakness.”

 

“I appreciate a good pair of legs,” Gillian confesses.

 

“And here I thought it was the breasts.”

 

“Well, they’re kind of hard to ignore too.” Gillian pauses. “The whole package is pretty gorgeous. Irresistible.”

 

“Shit. Stop it. Stop being nice.” Caroline wants to bang her head against the wheel.

 

“Yeah. We know how well you take compliments.”

 

“Shit.” Caroline repeats it.  “I wish I could quit you.”

 

“Well look at you, quoting a movie.” There is renewed warmth in Gillian’s voice.

 

They sit together and say nothing for what seems like forever, but in reality amounts to approximately three minutes. Caroline remains with her head resting on the steering wheel, eyes closed, shutting off the lights in several chaotic corridors of her memory palace, not unlike the timed lighting systems that automatically turn off in unvisited tomblike library stacks; her mind quiets, spiraling into silence. She feels Gillian’s hand sinking gently into her hair, fingers swimming, softly stirring currents of warmth that seep through Caroline’s skin. It’s strange and glorious and infuriating how Gillian knows when, and in what way, to touch her.  

 

“I’ve never wanted to make anything difficult for you,” Gillian says.

 

“Everything is difficult for me.”

 

She fully expects Gillian to mock her melodramatic self-pity, as her mother would; instead, a thumb gently traces the contours of her ear. 

 

“That’s why—well.” Gillian sighs. “See, I had a speech all worked out in my head, all the things I was going to say next time I saw you. ’Course, now I’m here it’s all a fucking jumble, and I was afraid, I knew you wouldn’t want to talk about it.” She gathers courage. “You sit in your house in the dark and you drink and it’s like you haunt the place. Your own home. You’re neither here nor there. You’re like a ghost, just flitting in between spaces and places to do what you have to do to get by. You’re hurt, and you’re lonely. And, well, yeah, I am too, in my way. So—do this with me. Let’s do this. It’s—only a thing, only something you need, something I need. Just for a bit. And it’ll be all right. It will. We won’t change, you and I. I won’t let it do that, and you won’t either.”

 

She knows Gillian is wrong, entirely wrong. She wants to say so many things. She wants to issue so many warnings and stage so many counterarguments because that is what she does, that is what she has always done. She is a pointless fucking Cassandra, always one step ahead of everyone, which is brilliant, really, except no one ever listens and as a result she has the definitive sensation that every step forward is deeper into the quicksand of loss and the mire of regret. Get out, she wants to say to Gillian, save yourself. Don’t fall in love with me, because I know you will. Or I will fall in love with you, which will be even worse. And every permutation, every outcome of what we are doing will be disastrous.

 

Caroline opens her eyes, leaves her head resting upon the steering wheel—it’s oddly comfortable and cool against her forehead. When she finally asks the question that officially signals her defeat, she turns, looking point blank at Gillian: “When?”

 

Gillian blinks; she has not thought this far ahead. “I don’t know. Maybe Monday afternoon? I’ll have time. But you’ll be at school.”

 

“I can arrange otherwise.” Caroline sits up, runs her hands through her hair; her eyes—inscrutable, tired—flash in the rear-view mirror as she readjusts it. Does the oracle ever know its own fate? “I’m the boss, you know.”

 

“Where?” Gillian’s body seems a lightning rod of urgency; she thrums with expectant energy.

 

“I don’t know yet.”

 

Gillian frowns. “I’ll call you?”

 

“Send me a message.”

 

“All right.” Gillian leans in for a kiss, but stops when her thigh is given a warning squeeze.

 

“Save it for later,” Caroline says. “I’ve already taken enough risks for one day.”

 

Testing Caroline’s resolve, Gillian lingers. “So bloody bossy,” she whispers.

 

“Didn’t seem to bother you the other night,” Caroline retorts.

 

Happily defeated for the time being, Gillian narrows her eyes. “All right.” Her hand trails down the sleeve of Caroline’s coat. “See you later, then.”

 

And then she’s gone, slamming the door, flipping up the collar of her jacket as she swaggers quickly toward the street.

 

Her coffee has turned cold, but Caroline drinks it anyway. It possesses no immediate benefit; her eyelids grow heavy. She burrows into her coat. Perhaps by the time she wakes up it will be Monday afternoon.

 

A good fifteen minutes later she’s roused into attention by a cold blast from outside—this time when the door opens, it’s Celia. “Good God,” she moans as she settles in. “Who knew something so simple could take forever? I swear, that old fruit goes on and on!”

 

“Mum, do you recall a conversation several months ago, the result of which induced William to draw up a list of words you were _not_ supposed to say ever?”

 

Celia fastens her seat belt. “Was that on the list? It seems rather innocuous.”

 

“It’s not.”

 

“Dear, you might as well accept I’m always going to put my foot in it.” Apologetically, she pats Caroline’s arm, spots the empty coffee cup, and smiles. “So you couldn’t sit still for so long, hmm?”

 

“Nope.” Caroline turns the key in the ignition. “I took a chance.”

 

Celia approves: “It’s always good to do that.”

 

Caroline believes she has tacit, imaginary approval now, a sign from the usually indifferent universe condoning the course of action she is about to take. And through what better mouthpiece than the woman who taught her how to be so damned judgmental? “You really think so?”

 

“Oh yes.” Celia pauses. “Well, I do now. Perhaps I didn’t so long ago, but things change. And sometimes, that’s the only reason that people change.”

 

“You know, that sounds very wise. I’m going to hold you to that.”

 

“Oh good God,” Celia moans, her fertile imagination now taking hold. “Now what are you going to tell me?”

 

As they gather speed, Caroline smiles. “Absolutely nothing.”


End file.
